The design of effective policies for the promotion of sustainable construction materials

Abstract

This research explores the associated effects of policy tools employed to promote sustainable building materials. By comparing the original motivations and intended effects of these policies and their actual outcome, and subsequently understanding the reasons behind any disparities between them, we suggest ways by which future policy planning can be improved. This research is based on seven detailed case studies. They cover the applications of virgin material taxes in Denmark and Sweden, forest management and biodiversity legislations in United States' Northwest and its coupling economic adjustment initiative, legislations/public outreach/demonstration projects on the use of substitute fuels for cement manufacturing in United States and the United Kingdom, and economic incentives to promote afforestation/reforestation in Chile. Each of these cases is attended by negative, unanticipated outcomes. By analyzing these outcomes, we observe that a negative and unanticipated policy outcome occurs when a sustainability indicator/issue is either completely ignored by policymakers, or the policymakers fail to identify intrinsic but inconspicuous links between seemingly disparate indicators.

(cont.) These unexpected outcomes can be reduced, or avoided, if policymakers conceptualize policies more broadly, for which purpose we propose the concept of integrated policymaking. This concept promotes the idea of co-addressing, or even co-optimizing, a wide range of eleven to sixteen sustainability indicators covering all the three domains of sustainability - economy, environment and employment. Furthermore, in doing so, policymakers must promote interactions among the different levels of governmental agencies (i.e. horizontal and vertical integration) and between the governmental and non-governmental stakeholder groups (i.e. time horizon integration and integration across stakeholder groups). We emphasize the significance of five different but interrelated types of feedback loops in supporting these different types and goals of integration. Finally, we applied this concept to the seven cases and proposed a series of innovative integrated policy strategies to address the negative, unanticipated outcomes observed.